Who wins with Dak’s new deal?
Dak Prescott agreed to extension with the Cowboys on March 8. The four-year pact will pay him $160 million with a maximum value of $164 million. The guarantees amount to $126 million – meaning Prescott moves ahead of the Houston Texans’ Deshaun Watson and will trail only the Kansas City Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes on the compensation scale when it comes to contract value, guaranteed money and average annual salary ($40 million).
Considerations go beyond Prescott’s wallet. Here are winners and losers from the deal:
Winners
Prescott: He is being paid like a Super Bowl MVP and reeled in the relatively shortterm deal that should allow him to cash in yet again in the nottoo-distant future – once the league’s coffers are full of newly negotiated television contracts that are expected to send the salary cap soaring once again. Prescott also has precious security on the heels of a season when he suffered a compound fracture and dislocation of his right ankle.
Dallas front office and locker room: Cowboys owner Jerry Jones finally turned on the cash spigot for Prescott, effectively resetting the NFL’s quarterback pay scale since Mahomes’ half-billion arrangement is an outlier. Yet Jones barely had to top Watson’s package and is investing in a worthy, popular player – while eliminating a distraction that has enveloped ownership and the locker room ever since Prescott was eligible for a new deal following the 2018 season.
Cowboys salary cap: Before striking a deal with Prescott, Dallas was scheduled to have about $20 million in available salary cap space this year, per Over The Cap – which sounds decent until you factor in that giving the quarterback another franchise tag would have cost $37.7 million and forced the club to either start restructuring a lot of deals for other players and/or releasing them. Not only that, but franchising Prescott anew would have surely complicated subsequent talks given that a potential third tag in 2022 would have been worth at least a cap-collapsing $54.3 million. But now the Cowboys might also be able to pursue one or two decent imports for a defense that was dominated in 2020.
Tom Brady: Consider that the five-time Super Bowl MVP is entering the second season of his two-year, $50 million contract with the Buccaneers, which means he’d currently rate – by far – as the most desirable quarterback on next year’s free agent market.
QBs drafted in 2018: The Browns’ Baker Mayfield, Bills’ Josh Allen – he finished second in 2020 MVP voting – and Ravens’ Lamar Jackson, who won MVP honors in 2019, are all eligible for megadeals of their own three years after each was a first-round pick.
Losers
The rest of the NFC East: With Prescott locked up, Dallas is now the only team in the division with stability under center.
Andy Dalton: He started nine times in Prescott’s stead last year and played reasonably well in his first pro season spent in his home state. But if Dalton, who’s scheduled to become a free agent later this month, had any thoughts of starting for Dallas this year amid a Prescott holdout or some such ... welp..
Russell Wilson: The unhappy Seattle Seahawks quarterback with the no-trade clause on his $35-million-ayear deal would’ve been willing to accept a (very farfetched) deal to the Cowboys, according to ESPN. All signs point to Russ cooking in the Pacific Northwest once again.
Prescott: He’s no longer the fourth-round flier made good, thriving on a cheap rookie deal and allowing Jones to stockpile veteran talent around him. As Wilson has learned, when you get the big checks, your supporting cast suddenly isn’t so supportive because the club can only invest so much in it.